AVG anti-virus has been increasingly pissing me off lately. I'd already had to disable two components, the Link Scanner and Web Shield because they slow down web browsing dramatically, but recently the Firewall component has been causing problems, culminating last night in a total inability to access the Internet, and to make matters worse, when I tried to disable the firewall, the application froze up.

I'd had it, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Even though I had a paid version of AVG (and about a year and a half left on it!), I uninstalled it. (And the uninstaller failed the first time through.) Version 7.5 was pretty good, but 8.0 is just unusable.

Since I'm not running 2000 Server anymore, I decided to go back to Eset NOD32, and I'm amazed at the difference. When I had AVG installed, the CPU meter in the Vista Sidebar kept spiking to 50-75% all the time. I'd assumed that was just Vista being a processor hog, even though I've got a fairly beefy quad-core CPU. But now that I'm running NOD32, the CPU meter is running about 1-3% most of the time. I'm not sure whether that means AVG is that bad or NOD32 is that good, or both.

Two years. I'd been using NOD32 for years on my server, until they dropped the ability to buy just a single business user license. That's the only reason I'd ever switched to AVG and paid for a full license.